Tuesday, 20 September 2016

Reaching New Heights

We had a great experience filming the charity video for the Essex & Herts Air Ambulance Trust. As well as filming the helicopter and the crew, we had the the added bonus of meeting and filming Jonny Coggan, a paralympic wheelchair rugby athlete.

The Airbase

It was a packed agenda at the Earls Colne Airbase in Colchester. The weather was on our side which meant the helicopter would be flying today. The helicopter was actually taking off as we arrived and offloaded our kit. There was no knowing when the crew would need to fly off for call or when the helicopter would return, so we knew this was going to be a bit of a run and gun shoot. We had to be ready.

The plan was to film in 50i interlaced with a few shots in progressive 25p as we knew some of the footage may be used for broadcast. We were just finishing off our first interview with one of the crew when we could hear the helicopter returning from a call out. We grabbed our kit and ran into position to grab the shots. Fortunately though we actually had some time later in the day to mock up a take off. One of our videographers, Michelle, actually got the opportunity to go inside the helicopter for the ride and get some footage from inside, it's not everyday you get the opportunity to film from up in the sky. However, I was most happy with my feet on the ground and filming from there.

Interviewing and filming Jonny was revealing. He had an amazing story of overcoming a life changing injury to his spine resulting in paralysis. Amazingly he is now a wheelchair rugby athlete and was due to compete in his fourth Paralympic games in Rio. What an amazing triumph and encouraging story.

The Training Session

Our second day shoot for this charity video was to get some footage of Jonny's rugby training session. Their training session had us astounded. For 3 hours it was virtually non stop and quite full on at times. There were no shortage of wheelchair clashes, and fortunately no injuries. It was quite an eye opener to a sport that we had not really seen much of before and to of been able to film this sport was quite a privilege.

Please do feel free to leave your comments below and we hope you enjoy the video.